User tracking is a prominent trend in online media. The ability to track and uniquely identify users is important for a wide range of marketing strategies. It is therefore expanding rapidly from the online to the mobile world. User interactions with mobile devices, along with the consumption of mobile services, can relay significant information about a user's behavior and their demographics. Understanding the user becomes equally important to the role and the utility of those services with regard to discovering user insights and intents. That intelligence is critical for prediction and optimization of marketing campaigns and their creative performance.
Mobile marketing efforts usually include various vendor products and services, along with 3rd party technologies and services to achieve campaign reach, frequency and conversion objectives. Achieving such objectives often requires use of a mix of marketing communication channels. Mobile user tracking is normally isolated with regard to individual products or individual marketing channels. As a result, tracking individual users across channels is not easily achieved.
Conversion is a standard metric used to measure the success of marketing campaigns, which can be based on the attrition of users that fail to proceed to each touch point on the way to completion of an actual user action. Examples of conversion events may include a file download by the user, a completion of a user registration form, or a purchase of products or services. Determining when a user clicks on an ad, watches it, and then whether or not the user takes action with respect to the ad is challenging. Evaluating conversion is further complicated by the wide ranges of activities, interactions and channels a user can undertake.
Mobile ad servers log impression delivery when ad tags are transmitted to a publisher's content server. A more desirable approach is to count impressions after actual presentation of the marketing messages to end users. Most mobile SSI systems have no way of determining whether an ad was delivered to the device and played to completion. The result is discrepancies in impression counting. Another example of the problem occurs when users navigate to new content before an ad creative has completely rendered. The result is impressions reported as delivered, even though not seen which can be a basis for advertiser payment concerns.
As a result, a need therefore exists for analysis and reporting tools to inform their allocation decisions. A need also exists to address issues relating to user tracking across different channels and to improve conversion and track return on investment. The embodiments of the invention address this need and others.